Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (3 page)

“So of course there are women of appropriate rank who wil have me—the problem is that I wouldn’t be wiling to marry any of them. If I ever do decide to get married, it’s going to be to someone who excites me to the very core of my being, someone who feels as though she and I were two halves of the same whole, waiting from before our births to be reunited: not just someone who would be politicaly appropriate. So what do you think, Wizard?”

His green eyes sought mine. I wondered briefly if he might be someone who would never find women romanticaly attractive, which would of course make the succession much more problematic. Without any good answer, I looked out toward the twilight courtyard and stammered, “Wel, a king of course, that is— I mean, minds have been known to change—” But whatever Paul was hoping I would say, it was not what he had been hearing from the queen and the Lady Maria. “I realy don’t know what you should do, sire,” I said, meeting his look. “You certainly shouldn’t force yourself to marry someone you find less appealing than your horses. And you can’t look at every woman you meet with both of you wondering if this is the one. Perhaps after a period of time—” Paul rose before I had to carry this inadequate ad\ace any further. “Wel, at least I know I have one more aly in the castle,” he said, settling his belt. “Maybe I’l go see Gwennie.” He ducked his head to go out through my door. “Gwennie?” I said, startled. “But she—”

“She should be done with her evening chores by now. She’s always been a good person to talk to—almost as good as you, Wizard,” he added generously. “She was the one who helped me decide how to break it to Mother the other year that I wasn’t going to marry either of the twins.”

And he was gone, leaving me looking thoughtfuly after him. That Gwennie was the daughter of the cook and the castle constable was only one of the reasons why I did not think her the best person with whom the king might discuss the question of whom he should marry.

When I went to find Antonia in the morning, she was wearing a yelow scarf belonging to one of the twins and finishing a big bowl of porridge with gusto. “Guess what, Wizard!” she said with an excited smile. “Hildegarde and Celia are going to teach me to ride a horse!”

“It’s very good of you, my ladies,” I began, “to help take care of my, uh, niece, but you realy—”

“We want to do it, Wizard,” said Hildegarde.

“They were going to teach me to read,” said Antonia, “but I told them I already knew how.”

‘Then later today,” said Hildegarde cheerfuly, “we’l teach her how to deal cards off the bottom of the pack.”

“What?!” I glared at the twins while Antonia grinned in anticipation.

“It can be a very useful skil for a lady,” said Celia, affecting a serious tone, “learning how to spot cheating so she wil not be tricked herself So we’l see you this afternoon, after our ride. Now, if you’l excuse us, we need to put on our riding habits.”

“Make sure the door is tight,” I heard Hildegarde say as it swung shut in my face. “He’s an old man. The shock of seeing us dressing couldn’t be good for him.” And al three of them—including, I was mortified to hear, my daughter—began to giggle.

Since it looked like I wasn’t going to spend the morning trying to make Antonia feel as comfortable with me as she apparently already did with the twins, I instead went to look for Gwennie.

I found her in the kitchen, slicing mushrooms for lunch. We grew mushrooms in the castle celars, and the cook made excelent soup with them. If Paul had not yet persuaded his mother that he was unready to marry anyone, Gwennie had yet to persuade her own mother that she would never be a cook.

I worked the pump for her. “Antonia seems happy that you put her in the suite with, the twins, Gwennie— uh, Gwendolyn,” I said.

But her frown had nothing to do with Antonia or with whatever I chose to cal her. She shook the water from a handful of mushrooms and moved her knife so fast I could scarcely folow. “Paul told me he’d talked to you yesterday,” she said after a quick glance around showed her mother and the kitchen maids al at the far side of the room. That she caled him simply by his name, without his tide, and didn’t even seem to notice that she had, told me how distressed she had been by their conversation.

“I can’t see him marrying a child princess any more than he can,” I said encouragingly.

“But she might be the best person for him,” Gwennie said, pushing away a strand of hair from her face with a damp wrist. The knife flashed again. “If he told the queen he’d marry her when she was five years older, then he wouldn’t be bothered in the meantime by a parade of other candidates. And in five years, anything—” She stopped herself. “The girl would have to be better than the duchess’s daughters.” She alowed herself a smile. “I’m sorry, Wizard. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this.”

“Better me than anyone else,” I said, working the pump again. Wizards in royal castles have always been in somewhat of an ambivalent position, with a power beyond that of kings if they cared to use it, yet on the paid staff like any servant. Most wizards manage to cultivate airs of authority and mystery that make everyone, from kings to stable boys, treat diem with deference. In spite of twenty-five years of intermittent trying, I had never gotten anyone at Yurt to treat me with deference and had decided it was not worth the effort.

“I didn’t tel Paul any of this, of course,” Gwennie said, scooping mushrooms from the board into a bowl.

“How about teling him not to chalenge an armed man for fun?” I said, but she wasn’t listening.

“If I started teling him the same things everyone else is saying,” she said, “he’d stop coming to talk to me.” Although Gwennie and Paul were almost exactly the same age and had played together as children, I had imagined they had grown apart in the last fifteen years. Perhaps I was mistaken.

“So don’t you agree, Wizard,” she said, looking at me with serious eyes that should have been bright and laughing, “that the best thing for him to do would be to marry the little princess? She’s certainly of a suitable station for him”—with only the slightest catch in her breath—”and I’m sure wil be wel trained to become a gracious queen of Yurt and mother of Paul’s children.” She turned away abruptly at that, making the gesture into rinsing off her knife with more than necessary energy.

The thought flashed through my mind that if Paul was going to wait until someone grew up, then even

Antonia might someday be old enough for him. But the ilegitimate daughter of a witch and a wizard would never be of suitable station for a king—even less than the daughter of a cook and castle constable.

Ill

The twins and Antonia came back from their riding lesson in the early afternoon. When they left they had been on two rangy geldings and a shaggy little pony, but they returned with Antonia sitting in front of Hildegarde, half asleep, and the pony led behind. A wilted chain of daisies was around the girl’s neck.

“I want to tel Mother I can ride now,” she roused herself to tel me. “Can we go see her?”

“Not right now, but you can tel me,” I suggested, carrying her into the castle.

“I can make the pony stop and go forward and even galop,” she murmured into my neck. “Hildegarde didn’t want me to galop but I did anyway. I only fel off once.”

“She fals very wel for a child,” said Celia, which I did not find nearly as reassuring as it was doubtless meant to be. I held Antonia close and stroked her fine hair.

Having left her asleep with the duchess’s daughters I returned to my chambers, feeling on edge and unable to concentrate on the spels I was trying to perfect for entertainment over dessert tonight. Instead I wrote Theodora a brief message to be sent on the carrier pigeons, teling her that Antonia’s first day in Yurt had gone wel, leaving out al mention of cheating at cards or fals from ponies, and saying I sent love from both of us.

As I came down from the pigeon loft in the tower, Gwennie met me. “You have a telephone cal, Wizard.”

For a second I imagined it was Theodora. But she had never wanted me to instal a magical telephone in her house, saying she would have no use for it—and since it would have been hard to conceal my relationship with her if I was always talking to her on the phone, I had to agree she had a point.

The cal was instead from my old friend the bishop of Caelrhon. “Joachim!” I said with pleasure. It had been ages since we’d talked. Even when I visited Theodora in the cathedral city he was usualy too busy with his duties for me to want to bother him. “How good to hear from you!”

His face was a tiny image in the base of the glass telephone: black hair streaked with gray at the temples, enormous and compeling dark eyes, and an expression of great seriousness—except sometimes when he was talking to me. I had long ago decided that I should count it a personal virtue rather than a failing that the bishop of the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon seemed to find me more amusing than he did anyone else.

“I would like your advice, Daimbert,” he said, not smiling now. “There is something, wel, strange going on here.”

“How strange?”

He hesitated. “It’s hard to say. A miracle-worker has come to town.”

This didn’t sound like the sort of thing to concern a wizard. “But that's good, isn’t it? Why do you need my advice?” The bishop hesitated again, just long enough for me to start to wonder if it might be serious after al. Joachim didn’t frighten easily. “I’m not sure he is realy working miracles,” he said at last. “He might be working magic. But he has started to acquire a folowing. I need to know if he is a fraud or has truly been touched by God.” Wizards could easily tel the supernatural from the natural forces of magic, I thought somewhat smugly, even if priests could not. The situation did not sound nearly as worrisome to me as it apparently did to the bishop, but it was always good to have an excuse to see him. And using my magic to help him would be much better than sitting around Yurt wondering who was going to marry whom. “Of course, Joachim. I can come right away.”

Even as I spoke it occurred to me that if I had just brought Antonia to Yurt in order to get to know her better, I could not very wel abandon her for quick trips to Caelrhon, even if she did seem to be spending more time with the twins than with me. But perhaps now might not be a bad time after al. She was napping anyway, so if I went at once I would miss dinner with her but should be able to solve the cathedral’s problems for them, see Theodora this evening, and stil be back first thing in the morning.

There had been a time, I thought as I went to look for the twins to tel them I was leaving Antonia with them, when I could not, as wizard of Yurt, have had anything to do with magical occurrences in the kingdom of Caelrhon. But for the last few years the Royal Wizard of Caelrhon had been a good friend. He lived in the royal castle, not in the cathedral city itself, and he had told me with exasperated firmness that if the cathedral was overrun with nixies he would just as soon have me deal with it myself. I was probably one of the few wizards in the western kingdoms to get along wel with a bishop.

I met Hildegarde in the middle of the courtyard, just coming back from the weapons shop where she told me she had left off a mail shirt for repairs. “Of course, Wizard,” she said casualy. “Antonia wil have so much fun with us she won’t even realize her uncle is gone.”

I peeked in a minute at my daughter: sleeping deeply, her cheeks flushed and her dol’s perky face next to hers. Celia sat reading her Bible nearby. A sweet scene, I thought, heading out of the castle for the flight to Caelrhon.

But Celia caught up with me. “You’re going to see the bishop?” she asked, low and intense. I was startled to see the change in her from the carefree young woman of just a short time earlier. Perhaps there were sides of her that did not come out when Hildegarde was there. “Take me with you, Wizard.”

It would mean going in the air cart rather than flying myself, which would have been faster, but I couldn’t very wel refuse. Hildegarde could certainly watch over my daughter by herself—though I wondered if she might indeed have made her into a warrior by the time I came back. In ten minutes Celia and I were rising above the towers of the royal castle, and the air cart began the steady flapping of wings that would take us to Caelrhon.

I studied her as we flew. She sat in the skin of a purple flying beast, whipping along a quarter mile above the ground, the wind tugging her midnight hair free of its pins, with no more apparent wonder at the experience than if she had been taking a horse to the cathedral city, She wore a simple dark dress that accented her slimness and her ivory skin, and I thought that it didn’t seem right that someone so young and pretty should be so glum. Her eyes were focused inward, as though concentrating on something she needed to do or say.

When she spoke it was clear that whatever speech she was preparing was not intended for me. Instead she said, “I gather you and the bishop have always been friends, Wizard?”

“Most of the time for twenty-five years,” I agreed. “Institutionalized magic and institutionalized religion normaly have no use for each other, but Joachim and I have managed to be friends in spite of each thinking that the other one is seriously misguided on certain important points.” But Celia was not interested in the milennia-old tensions between wizardry and the church. “Al I realy need is an introduction,” she said, “a chance, maybe only for a quarter hour, to talk to him directly. I’ve tried reaching him before but have always been put off by one priest or another, who just tel me I’m being sily and shouldn’t bother His Holiness.”

“And are you being sily?” I asked lightly, trying to take some of the sharp intensity from her face.

She did not smile. “It’s not sily to know what you want—what you were meant to do. The only trouble is with others who think they can plan your life better than you can for yourself.” I nodded, not sure what I was agreeing to but thinking of Paul.

Celia and I were shown into the bishop’s study after only a short wait. A shaft of late afternoon sunlight lay across the floor. Joachim stepped out of the shadows to meet us, tal and sober in his formal scarlet vestments. He lifted an eyebrow, mildly surprised to see a young woman with me.